


In the Woods Somewhere

by vials



Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Backstory, Basically Me Going Ape With Worldbuilding When Nobody Asked, Folklore, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:13:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22218370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Athos has a habit of exploring the places Makt has forgotten and reciting the stories Makt wishes it could forget. He doesn't usually find much, but this time, he's pretty sure it's going to be different.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6





	In the Woods Somewhere

The trees were impossibly quiet, the white of their bark eerily bright in the gloom. It was perhaps just as well that the days of large predators were long gone now; Athos was sure they would be able to hear he and his sister coming from a mile away otherwise. They were the only two sources of sound in the forest, and even then, it wasn’t without their best efforts to stay quiet. There was something unnerving about walking with reckless abandon through the brittle twigs littering the ground; it felt far too much like they were pushing their luck, so they at least made an effort to tread carefully. Both of them watched their feet, stepping neatly around the larger twigs, but it was impossible to avoid them all and even the smallest snap seemed to travel too far in the silence around them. 

The trees were so tightly packed together in some areas that they had no choice but to split up a little on occasion, each of them finding their own path through the thick, leafless branches. The trees had been without foliage for generations, so they were able to see one another clearly, but it was still a necessity that neither of them enjoyed. Athos had never walked through this way with anybody else before – his explorations were usually something he did on his own – so he had never noticed it, but sound was _very_ strange in this forest. He was beginning to rethink how loud they were being after all, because while he could hear the twigs crunching under his own shoes he realised that his sister seemed to be walking completely silently, despite being only a few dozen feet away from him at most. At one point it was so strange to see her moving through the white trees like a pale ghost, silent and seeming miles from him, that Athos almost called out to her. Only the fear of realising that she might not be able to hear him kept him from doing so. He was probably letting his imagination run away from him, he reasoned – something that Astrid had accused him of many times before – but he didn’t fail to notice the way she was frowning slightly as she rejoined him, glancing back at his path with a distrustful stare. He also did not miss how the two of them stuck together after that, walking in single-file rather than splitting up.

At least the realisation had relieved them of one thing, and that was the idea that they couldn’t talk. It had seemed as though it would be too loud to talk at first, but now both of them were aware that there was a high chance nobody would be able to hear them after all, some of the pressure was off. Regardless, Athos noticed that neither of them stopped watching where they were walking, but at least they didn’t have to do so in total silence.

“I can’t believe you come out here on your own,” Astrid said, keeping her voice low as though not wishing to tempt fate too much. “I think I would find it far too creepy.”

“Hardly,” Athos replied. “You’re not scared of anything.”

“I didn’t say I’d be _scared_ ,” Astrid pointed out. “I just said it’s _creepy_. And it is. I don’t know how you do it, with your head full of all those stories.”

“There’s a story about this place, you know,” Athos said, and Astrid laughed.

“Of course there is. Is that why you came out here?”

“No,” Athos said. “Really,” he added, seeing his sister’s disbelieving look. “I come out to all the places outside the city. There’s a load of different estates, left over from the old days. They used to be the country estates of various noblemen and women, back when there was a royal court. Remember?”

“There’s one out here? Oh, _wonderful_ ,” Astrid said, her attention caught. “Is the house left over? Is there anything _useful_ in it?”

“That’s what I’m hoping to find out,” Athos said. 

Astrid quickened her step by a half-pace and linked her arm through Athos’s, leaning against him as they picked their way through the brittle undergrowth. Athos could feel she was excited – he had never returned from one of his trips and invited her to come back with him before. He either showed up with whatever he had found, or he showed up with nothing at all. Astrid had never been overly interested in the idea of trekking out of the city for hours and poking around in abandoned buildings, and Athos could hardly blame her. It was often pointless work, not to mention cold and tiring and usually very dirty. Many of the houses had been bricked up via magic, the doors and windows completely sealed and the fault lines for breaking them open again invisible to anyone without ground magic – which, conveniently, was the magic that Athos had found himself with a useful trace of. Astrid had decided to leave him to it after accompanying him on one of his earliest trips, finding herself dreadfully bored, sitting there while Athos poked at the walls and tried to find a way in. Considering the very high chance that the buildings would have nothing of note in them anyway, it wasn’t worth the boredom. 

“You think you found something?” she asked.

“I hope so,” Athos replied. “But like I told you before, don’t get your hopes up too high.”

“You won’t tell me anything about it,” Astrid said, looking up at him with a mock-hurt expression. “What did I do to deserve such distrust?”

“I told you,” Athos said, laughing. “I _can’t_ tell you. I need to see if what I experienced is real, or if it was just my imagination. If I tell you what I think I experienced, you’ll have the idea in your head and you might think you experienced it, too. It’s better this way. It’ll be more accurate.”

“Well,” Astrid said decisively. “Now I’m _truly_ intrigued.”

She would have to be intrigued for some time yet. Athos estimated they probably had an hour left of walking, and that was on top of the three that they had already done. They had left before the sun had even risen, because the first part of the journey was easy – walk east into the forest, and keep going until the trees began to grow scarcer. With the sun rising, they could be sure of their direction; with the trees being so white, they didn’t have to worry about walking into them. The darkness was lifting more and more around them now, the shadows between the trees seeming almost smoky as they lightened into grey, the bark of the trees taking on a brightness that was almost too much to look at. Once, Athos knew, the bark had been brown, and the leaves had been full and green. He had seen illustrations of such things, but he couldn’t imagine it now. 

“So,” Astrid said, squeezing his arm. “What’s the story of this place?”

“Oh, you’ll love this,” Athos said, smiling. “You know why the trees look like that, right?”

“Of course,” Astrid said. “They’re all dying, like everything else in this world.”

“Well, there’s a story going around that they didn’t die without a fight,” Athos said, falling into the story with ease. He had recited it to himself countless times, wandering through this forest. Unnerving though it was, it had become a way to mark the time that had passed. “That something in them ripped itself free as the world died around it. Something from every tree, that then gathered close together and became something of its own.”

“More corruption,” Astrid said, with an exaggerated shudder.

“Maybe,” Athos said, shrugging. “Or maybe not. Nobody really knows. But it’s said that whatever it was took on a physical form, and you can sometimes catch sight of it. It’s difficult to see, because it looks so much like the trees – it’s spindly, and looks like white bark, and if it stands still you might walk right on past without realising it wasn’t a tree after all. But if you noticed it moving and looked more closely, or if you got a sense that something was wrong and looked up, you’d see something peering right back down at you.”

Astrid laughed, but Athos didn’t miss the way her eyes moved across the trees around them. “So any one of these could be… what, a leg?”

“That’s what they say,” Athos said. “That one, and maybe that one over there.”

“That’s further apart than I would have thought legs would be.”

“It’s a very tall creature,” Athos said. “It has to hunch over so it can blend in with the height of the rest of the trees. If it stood up straight, it would disappear into the low cloud.”

“And that’s why you would see its face if you looked up,” Astrid said, and despite herself she glanced up above them, through the gaps in the bare branches and to the pale white sky above. “Because it’s hunched over and looking down at you.”

“Apparently,” Athos said. “And while you’re trying to work out just what it is you’re looking at – because it would be difficult, I think, to work out what’s going on when you see something so tall and unnatural and so blended in to the white around you – it could just sweep a hand out and grab you. Its fingers are spindly and long, but they say it has enough strength to squeeze a person dead. They’ve found some strange bodies out here, you know.”

“Oh?” Astrid asked, her eyes glittering. “Well, don’t spare the details.”

“There was a body found a few months ago that certainly looked like it had been squeezed,” Athos said. “The stomach was ruptured and open, and the eyes bulging out, and depending on who you ask, the top of their head was gone. Like it had been popped off. Then there was a few more cases that go back over the years, all similar things – organs everywhere, crushed bones. They found one body with all its blood drained.”

“Ritual murders,” Astrid said dismissively, but she hadn’t let go of Athos’s arm. “I’d bet any money it was ritual murders. You know what people around here would do for magic. I’m sure there was some strange logic behind every injury.”

“But how would you _inflict_ those injuries?” Athos asked.

Astrid frowned in thought and was silent for several moments, before she shrugged. “Well, admittedly I don’t know. But I’m sure there’s a way to do it that doesn’t involve… what? Sentient tree spirits?”

“That’s something I don’t know,” Athos said, amused. “I don’t know what you’d call the creature in terms of what it is, but out in the farming villages they call it _Nicht Nacht_.”

It was an unusual name, Athos thought. _Nicht_ was an old Maktahn word roughly meaning _night_ , or _related to the night_ , and _nacht_ was a word still in use which was used to denote a negative – something _not_ being, something _not_ belonging. Put together, the name hinted at an absence of night, which Athos couldn’t make sense of. 

“Perhaps it’s because the last thing you’d ever see is something so bright white leaning in towards you,” Astrid said, as though reading his mind.

“I can always count on you to make something _especially_ creepy, baby sister,” Athos said fondly, and she laughed. 

“I’m not afraid of it. Look at us. We’re bright white, too. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Not like regular Maktahns. Maybe it’ll just think that we’re one of its own.” She laughed again. “The son and daughter of a forest demon.”

“I hope so,” Athos said. “Perhaps that’s why I’ve been able to wander around here with no trouble, hmm?”

“And if not, and it’s just coincidence,” Astrid said, nodding to how the trees were beginning to thin out around them, “let’s hope it was worth the risk after all.”

The trees grew sparse with an unusual suddenness, seeming to jump away from one another as though they had come to notice they were too close. They ended even more abruptly, a neat line dividing them from a now overgrown garden. There had never been a wall here – the house’s occupants had trusted that their remote location would serve as protection from trespassers – but once upon the time the wild weeds and long grass they stepped into had been a manicured garden, likely with flowerbeds and pathways. Any evidence of such things had long decayed now, but the house itself was mostly standing, even if the crumbling fountain in its courtyard had seen better days.

“Wow,” Astrid said appreciatively, craning her neck to look at it. “This is quite the place.”

“Isn’t it?” Athos agreed. “I think it’s the biggest one I’ve found. It was a _nightmare_ to get into, too. By the time I managed it, I didn’t have long to look around before I had to start the journey back.”

“And in that small amount of time, you found something worth dragging me all the way out here for?” Astrid asked, and Athos smiled.

“I hope so. Come on.”

He led her through the overgrown garden, loosely following his path from before, still visible in the trodden weeds. Thorns snagged at their clothing and scratched at their exposed wrists and hands, and every so often the ground under their feet would get oddly marshy, water threatening to spill into their boots. Once again, Athos tried to visualise the water pattern in his mind, wondering if they were walking over a filled-in pond or garden river. How quickly had this house’s occupants left? Such questions fascinated and frustrated him in equal amounts. Had it been a gradual thing, with heir after heir growing more reclusive and sickly as the magic faded, until finally – like most people in Makt now – they had realised they could have no children? Had the last heir died out here, alone and childless; did their skeleton still occupy an upstairs bedroom? Or had the family fled when things had gotten bad in London, hearing of the unrest and the chaos that was occurring so comparatively near? Had they gathered up a bag of possessions and fled further into the country, fully expecting to return? 

“This place is like a fortress,” Astrid said, as they stepped out of the garden and onto the bramble-covered path that wound around the house. “There’s nothing at all. I can sort of see the outline where the windows were, but…” She reached out, touching her finger to the slightest line in the stonework. “That’s depressing, isn’t it? I bet it looked lovely when it had all its doors and windows.”

“I imagine the family had them all covered over before they left,” Athos said. “To stop looters, probably. Or maybe they were sheltering inside, and they covered them over as protection.”

“So they might still be in there,” Astrid said, laughing. “What if we come across them?”

“Surely they’d all be dead by now.”

“Not if they managed to have babies. There could be an entire line of them going right back. A place like this would have plenty of servants to stop parentage getting too freaky.”

Athos laughed. “You sound like you want that kind of scandal a little too much.”

“It would be _delightfully_ unnerving,” Astrid said. “We’re wandering around, we hear something, we look. There’s some people scuttling around in the shadows who haven’t seen daylight for a century. Wouldn’t _that_ be something?”

“Is this revenge for telling you about the _Nicht Nacht_?” Athos asked. “Because if so, point taken.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Astrid said, gently touching his shoulder as though sincerely concerned he might be frightened. “You know such a thing is impossible. Barely anyone in this entire world can have babies. I’m sure they would have died off long ago.”

“How comforting,” Athos said, amused.

Even if he had worried about its truth, Astrid’s point was sound. The idea of such a small group of people being able to have children for that long was completely impossible – it seemed less and less children were born every year. It had begun a few generations after the doors had all closed and the world had begun dying; everything related to life itself seemed to wither. People got sicker easier, the animals all began to die off. The plants and vegetables struggled to survive, many of them dying and those that survived yielding small and often rotting fruit. The weather had gradually slowed and then all but stopped, leaving most days looking exactly like this one: bitterly cold and with an endless, pale-white sky. Barely anybody had the ability to have children now, as though any life out there had recognised that this was not a world to try and begin in. Many people who managed to get pregnant lost the child before it was born, though if the baby survived to be born it would likely survive to be killed by one of Makt’s many other dangers: illness, starvation, violence. It was said that only those possessing some magic, however little, would be able to have children, so there was a booming market in kidnapping small children for various magical practises. Siblings were rare, and families with more than one child often had to flee the city or else live a life of constant defence. Twins were practically an impossibility – _two_ babies carried and born safely at the same time? – and Athos and Astrid could both remember the dangers they had faced growing up. They hadn’t even been allowed out of the grounds of their family home until they had been old enough to adequately wield a knife. Any hope their parents might have had that their being twins would go unnoticed thanks to them being a boy and a girl had been dashed the more they had grown into the very image of one another; had their parents not both conveniently vanished or died or whatever they had done, Athos thought he and his sister would probably still be languishing in their family home, forbidden to leave lest they end up as the latest sacrifice.

As he approached the window he had broken open on his last visit, he supposed there might be some truth in it. After all, didn’t the superstition go that twins would always possess magic? That it was the only way they would have survived to make it out of the womb? The opened window was proof of his own magic; the way the darkened interior lit in the flickering orange light from the small flame cupped in Astrid’s palm was proof of hers. 

“Wow,” Astrid said, and then giggled in excitement. “This is going to be _interesting_.”

She raised her hand slightly, stretching her arm out, and the light from the flame travelled a little further down the hallway. The house smelled stale, but it had been so well shut off that nothing else was amiss. Everything looked exactly how it must have done on the day it was abandoned, the long rug rolled out down the entrance hall, the portraits and paintings still on the walls. A coat rack was by the door, still with several jackets hanging on it; several pairs of shoes were tucked in neatly next to it. Small tables littered the hallway, some of them holding vases with long-dead flowers, others small ornaments or other trinkets. Astrid walked slowly around, squinting at all the different things, while Athos craned his neck up and peered towards the high ceiling. The shadows prevented him from seeing all the way to the top, but he could see the vague outline of the first few balconies, and more so than that he could feel the cavernous space above him. Exploring the whole place would likely take weeks, but Athos was beginning to think it might be worth it. Especially if what he thought he’d found last time turned out to be useful. 

“Let’s stay here tonight,” Astrid said suddenly, turning to Athos with eyes that glittered in the lowlight. “I want to go through _everything_. I bet there’s so much here we can use.”

“Probably,” Athos agreed. “Plenty we could _sell_ , that’s for sure.”

“We should be careful what we sell,” Astrid pointed out. “We don’t want to screw ourselves over. Look at the runes on the doorway here. This was clearly a highly magical family; there could be all kinds of invaluable stuff in here.”

“Which brings me to why I brought you here,” Athos said, beckoning with his finger. “Over here. This was the study, from the looks of it.”

Astrid fell into step beside him as they walked the short distance along the hall and to a grand pair of double doors flanked on either side by intricate stone pillars. As they passed through, the light from Astrid’s fire passed over the runes and symbols etched into the stone, making the shadows jump and flicker as though the whole thing were moving. The door made no sound as it swung open, revealing a vast room lined with heavy bookshelves and, on the wall to their right, a large blank space where it was safe to assume a huge window had once been, looking out onto the fields and forest beyond the house. 

“Here,” Athos said, finding he had dropped his voice to a low murmur, as though worried he might distract Astrid from what it was he was hoping she would notice. “Over by the desk.”

The desk was utterly enormous – Athos and Astrid could have stretched out on it at arms’ length to one another and there would have still been room to spare. It was an orderly space, still with several books opened on the pages that had been being referenced, the chair pushed out ever so slightly to the side as though somebody had just risen from it. Behind the desk the bookshelves reached up into the shadows gathered at the room’s ceiling; there was a distinct sense of absence in the room, but it was a reluctant one – as though the person would return to their desk at any moment. 

Athos let Astrid look for herself, wondering if she would be drawn to the same place. She circled the desk thoughtfully, one hand held up in front of her, the other hand lightly tracing fingers along the desk’s surface, the old books that rested there. She moved around to the other side of the desk and Athos did the same, slowly following the circle of flickering light as she approached the chair and considered it for a moment, perhaps feeling the same strange presence as Athos did – that whoever had been sitting there had only gone for a moment. Then she glanced up at the desk in front of the chair and saw the small, dried splatters of what was clearly blood; her face brightened in interest and she followed the blood splatters down to the ground and across the floor behind the desk, and then Athos saw her freeze and he knew she had seen it; knew she felt it too. 

Athos moved up beside her, eager to ask, but not wanting to ruin the moment. The silence stretched on, and he held his tongue until Astrid finally moved again, crouching and holding the light over it.

“What do you feel?” Athos finally asked, and it was another infuriating few seconds before his sister answered. 

“It’s… _humming_ ,” she said quietly.

Athos crouched down next to her, and yes – that was a good way of putting it. He could feel it again now, a vibration just underneath his skin, making him want to reach out and touch the glossy black stone that was the source of it. He waited for Astrid to give into temptation and touch it, and when she did he felt the shock that travelled through her; the jolt of something powerful and _knowing_. 

“What is it?” she asked. “It looks… is it part of the floor?”

“I think it used to _be_ the floor,” Athos said.

The floor around them was dull now, but once it had been wood, no doubt so polished that it had shone. Years of neglect had gotten rid of that, but not for this patch; it was still smooth and glassy enough that even in the low, flickering light, Athos could see their reflections perfectly. Its edges were defined, the blackness breaking away and the dull floor seamlessly against it, no gap to show it had been placed in there deliberately. It was as though part of the floor had simply _changed_. 

“You don’t think…?” Astrid asked, glancing at him before looking back to the strange patch of black. “I mean, I heard of that happening, but I thought they’d gotten rid of it all.”

“But we always said there was _bound_ to be more,” Athos said. He finally gave up trying to resist, reaching out and pressing his palm flat against the stone. It was warm, and as soon as his skin touched it a current seemed to sing through his skin and travel up his arm, spreading through his body as though eager to see him. “If we could get it out of the floor… or even chip a piece off…”

Astrid smiled, also reaching out to touch at it. “We’d be hanged at dawn.”

“Who’s going to hang us, if we have _this_ kind of power?” Athos asked.

Astrid laughed. It was a bright sound; a triumphant sound, and Athos knew she had thought along the exact same lines as him – that _this_ was what they had been looking for all along, even if they hadn’t realised it. 

“If we get it,” she said, “we won’t have to worry about any of your stories on the way back. We’ll _be_ the things in the stories.”

“Well,” Athos said. “We always knew we were going to be in stories.”

“What stories they’re going to be,” Astrid murmured softly, running her finger gently over the stone.

The fire in her palm seemed to blaze brighter.


End file.
